Africa Rising

Format: 1 x 55
Available in HD

Remember Band Aid, Live Aid and the developed countries’ determination to ‘Feed The World’? We failed – there are more Africans living in extreme poverty today than ever before. Shot in high definition, Africa Rising goes right inside the extraordinary story of how a large rural area of Ethiopia is taking itself out of poverty. With a cast of thousands, our film will open the eyes of the world to a new dawn of Africans solving Africa’s needs themselves.

In a controversial, colourful and frequently uplifting one-hour documentary, we highlight the failure of Western policies towards Africa, asking whether it's time to reconsider the role of Western aid workers on the continent.

Take a look around Ethiopia: in many regions schools lie abandoned; in others you find derelict hospitals; all around are vast areas of dry, barren land where the soil has been washed away. Misguided western governments and agencies thought they knew the answer – billions upon billions of dollars, euros and yen committed, with virtually no long-lasting results and much of the money ending up in the wage packets of foreign aid workers, in bank accounts far from Africa. It didn’t need to be this way; with costs at just a fraction of the norm, the answer was astonishingly simple. Twenty men and women are taught new skills such as dam building, bricklaying, soil rotation, micro-banking or livestock rearing. The deal is that each of them has to pass their new- found knowledge on to twenty more; their ‘followers’. Those followers then pass it on to twenty more, and so on. Within a short period, tens-of-thousands are now growing cash crops for the first time, digging irrigation systems and even building their own hospitals and schools.

Shot on a grand scale across great swathes of land, this film records a success story in one of the most deprived regions of the world.